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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (13914)	8/20/1998 10:24:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Just for the record - my letter to Forbes, so far with no response (I sent it two days ago): Although I have become resigned to the fact that the financial papers and magazines are not a good place to get accurate information about the details of technical issues, I was nonetheless disappointed to read Cellular Babble by Vicki Contavespi. It starts out well enough with a fact that is often overlooked in the religious wars of cellular technology - that consumers don't care about the underlying technology; they care about cost, roaming, ... . However it then moved into the area of technical details, many of which were wrong as published. For instance "The standard that Europe and Japan are leaning toward is wideband CDMA (related to TDMA, not Qualcomm's CDMA, which is narrowband.)" This is just plain incorrect. TDMA has absolutely nothing in common with W-CDMA. TDMA has a different air interface technology (CDMA vs TDMA) and it uses a different ground interface protocol than WCDMA, which uses a ground interface derived from GSM. (Surprisingly, TDMA and Qualcomm's CDMA use the same ground interface protocol). CDMAOne, on the other hand, uses the same air interface technology as WCDMA, albeit with different protocols. For a good analogy, think of GSM, which uses TDMA type technology, as analagous to copper wire, and CDMA as fibre optic. It may be true that the first fibre optic data transmissions were no faster than copper wire, but as the data rates go up it is likely that the people who pioneered fibre optics are going to have many more of the pertinent patents for wideband fibre than the guys just moving over from copper. Thus, the following is complete bunkum: " This one is called wideband CDMA. Does this mean good news for Qualcomm? Nope. Qualcomm owns the patents on narrowband CDMA. Qualcomm is not nearly as major a player in the wideband arena." First there is no major player in wideband CDMA since it is deployed nowhere. Second, see the analogy of fibre optics vs copper. Third, ETSI, the organization responsible for WCDMA, has admitted that Qualcomm patents are essential for WCDMA. They just don't think that they should have to pay for them even though as recently as two years ago most of the ETSI members were claiming CDMA would never work. Qualcomm spent vast amounts of money proving otherwise. In yet another error, Ms. Contavespi says "Even Warkentin, the head of the GSM Alliance, agrees that wideband CDMA is the future. Qualcomm feels the same, just as long as the world's next CDMA solution is called cdma2000. " This is, emphatically, not Qualcomm's goal, although it is the way some of the ETSI folks like to put it. Qualcomm has put out several position papers on what it is that they want: 1) The next generation system should be the best it can be technically, 2) Where there is no driving technical requirement it should be backwards compatible with as many of the existing systems as possible. Thus, by going with CDMA for the 3G system (as is required by rule 1 above), backwards compatibility with the GSM air interface is impossible in almost all aspects, but partial compatibility with CDMAOne is not and thus should be done by rule 2. At the same time, the 3G system does not require any particular ground interface in order to meet the technical requirements, so therefore, by rule 2 given above, the ground interface should be equally backwards compatible with both the US systems (used by both TDMA and CDMAOne) and GSM. ETSI has violated both of these rules, and it is this to which Qualcomm objects. Perhaps you should have actually read Qualcomm's position paper before publishing. Finally, the author appears completely oblivious to the fact that numbers can, and are, twisted. Any number she gets from Ericsson or Qualcomm should be considered with suspicion. Every side claims cheaper infrastructure costs, etc., and depending on how you slice it it is probably possible to prove any point you would like. The only people that should be trusted on this issue are those that have operated both types of system, and to date they aren't talking. I hope that in the future you will do a little more balanced reporting, and get someone with a little more technical knowledge to edit the articles. Clark Hare PS The absolute best piece of misinformation, (so bad it's funny) is " Wideband is focused on providing voice services where narrowband is based on providing data and messaging services like two-way paging." Not! Wideband in this context is targeted at video and data (i.e internet traffic), narrowband is voice (!!!!) with a tiny fraction of the bandwidth assigned to messaging. Under no circumstances does voice require wideband. And narrowband is not primarily concerned with data. Period.